Tweets for Eats

Pizza Hut recently announced its decision to help World Hunger Relief, a campaign supporting the United Nations World Food Program, work towards an end to hunger. Pizza Hut is pledging four meals for every Twitter follower who re-Tweets the link to Pizza Hut's World Hunger donation page.
Twitter users must simply Tweet a post containing the website link and the hashtag #pizzahut, and the company will donate four meals to those in need around the world. Over 36,000 other companies and franchised restaurants will be contributing to World Hunger Relief's mission to eliminate hunger worldwide.

http://ow.ly/qWn8
Above is the website link to Pizza Hut's World Hunger donation page.

www.fromhungertohope.com/donate
Above is a link that contains more information about World Hunger Relief.

Paid to Tweet

One of the new trends in advertising is paying a celebrity or spokesperson to Tweet or blog about a product. Some consumers are not happy about this. They think that this practice has tainted the organic, word-of-mouth social networking sites. 

     

However, what is the difference between paying Taylor Swift to Tweet about her favorite brand of boots, and paying Eva Longoria Parker to represent L'Oreal on commercials and in print ads? Attached is a story from AdAge about this new advertising practice. 

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=138980

The consumers who do not support paid Tweets and blogs about products have good reason to be wary. Because money is involved, things get a little sticky. Just because a celebrity endorses a product does not mean they use it or that the product works. Many consumers look to Twitter and blogs for actual product reviews and recommendations. 

However, I understand the desire of the ad agencies to personally connect with consumers. The Internet is a great medium to connect more personally with target audiences.

"Facebook has more followers than Buddha..."

The link to this story in  Forbes tells how executive Sheryl Sandberg is helping Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg make his website profitable. Sandberg and Zuckerberg have made Facebook into the most popular social networking site (250 million members and growing), but still are not bringing in enough revenue.  

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0907/power-women-09-facebook-sheryl-sandberg.html

Zuckerberg made many attempts to earn money through advertising on Facebook. When users found out that he was basically selling user data, they were outraged at the violation of their privacy. Users signed petitions and Zuckerberg eased up on some of his data-selling practices. It was Sandberg who really helped Zuckerberg realize that Facebook needed to work on its image as a protector of its user's information. Together they began to work on helping users control who sees their information. 

As far as PR goes, Sandberg was a lifesaver for Zuckerberg who was sinking under criticism from users, privacy advocates, and investors. Obviously Facebook needs to find some way to earn revenue for the site to continue, but they must be careful not to violate their user's privacy. Facebook's popularity with a broad demographic of users makes it a huge database of information. In the article, Zuckerberg describes his idea of a "social graph", or the broad network of friends, acquaintances, and companies that surround everyone. Advertisers would pay tons of money for access to this information, but what is important is how they gain access to that information and how many privacy rights Facebook users must give up in the process.